Everything NN-related is compress and decompress if you squint hard enough. You are trying to map inputs to outputs in an efficient way space-wise or time-wise

Everything NN-related is compress and decompress if you squint hard enough. You are trying to map inputs to outputs in an efficient way space-wise or time-wise. The NN is doing something which allows it to skip complex calculations at the expense of fidelity in a way which is not far from a more advanced look up table. The fact that what it does is so opaque remains the main flaw of it.